When Mother’s Day hurts

For many, Mother’s Day is the farthest thing from a Hallmark commercial. Rather than a day filled with flowers, hugs, and happiness, it’s a day marked with awkwardness, sadness, or hurt.

For some the hurt comes from the inability to have a child and become a mother. For others it’s about the loss of a mother, and for others it’s about a troubled relationship.

In the essay below, San Francisco-based writer Sabrina Crawford shares why Mother’s Day is a difficult day for her.

Shutterstock/Jule_Berlin

Mother’s Day is marked with sadness for some.

As Mother’s Day rolls around, I get a little uneasy. In fact something about the fistfuls of pastel bouquets, boxes of sickly sweet chocolates and $100 indigestion-inducing brunches makes me downright

queasy.

You see, my mother and I don’t exactly have a “picture-perfect”

mother-daughter relationship (if such a thing even truly exists). She

suffers from chronic, severe mental illness, making “true connection”

of the Hallmark and Lifetime variety next to impossible for us.

And so for me, Mother’s Day is a time to don my best dress and heels, slap on a faux smile and prepare to stare blankly across the long table, feeling both way too close and infinitely far away; a time to struggle in vain for something, anything to say.

And yet as Sunday approaches I head to the local drugstore, like

everyone else. Aimless, adrift, I wander the soft-pink special

occasion lane, my senses assaulted by an army of lemon chiffon and

lavender “My Mom’s The Greatest”‘s and stomach-churning floods of

rose eau de toilette — searching for the perfect sentiment, which does

not exist.

Just when I’m about to give up and leave empty handed, there amid the half-off, half-melted Easter eggs, I notice something: head